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TODAY’S MAZE
Happy Monday! Pinterest is turning living rooms into storefronts via a new Roku partnership. Users can now buy items from their screens, linking pins to purchases.
Interactive entertainment signals a move away from passive ads toward immersive experiences. But will consumers buy products while they binge-watch?
In today’s MarketMaze focus:
Pinterest’s shoppable TV series
eBay’s agentic AI strategy
AWS launches Sovereign Cloud
AI Max query dilution
Apps Eat Commerce
+Handpicked recent news you need to know
P.S. Check next poll below the first news & the last poll results at the end of the issue!
LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder
MAZE STORY
The Maze: Pinterest and Roku partner to bridge the gap between inspiration and checkout with a new streaming series. This original content enables converting digital boards into physical transformations by purchasing items directly from featured brands.
The series features creators like Drew Michael Scott who help turning digital pins into tangible home transformations through shoppable formats that link directly to brand partners.
This integration follows a recent pilot with Walmart recipe pins that enables adding essential ingredients to digital carts through a single tap while browsing various curated images and videos.
Recent market data highlights how social influence guides Gen Z buyers who purchase influencer-recommended products at a rate 20 times higher than their parents or grandparents across all digital channels.
Why it matters: Turning passive entertainment into active commerce helps platforms capture intent at the earliest stage of the buyer journey. As social platforms evolve into storefronts, brands must master connected TV commerce to reach consumers who value authenticity over traditional advertising.
Over the next two years, which channel do you expect to influence product discovery the most for Gen Z shoppers in the US and Europe?
- 📺 Shoppable TV (streaming content with direct checkout on platforms like Roku)
- 📌 Visual platforms (Pinterest-style inspiration turning into commerce)
- 📱 Short video social (creator-led discovery on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts)
- 🔍 Search-led retail (Amazon and Google remaining the primary discovery layer)
- 🛍️ Marketplaces only (buyers skipping inspiration and going straight to listings)
- Other
P.S. We’ll highlight the sharpest answers in the next issue. Anonymous by default, unless you tell us we can use your name.
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MAZE STORY
The Maze: eBay leaders shared a vision for 2026 where agentic AI embeds trust directly into the marketplace rather than treating it as an afterthought. This strategic outlook focuses on real-time verification and hyper-personalized discovery to help buyers find the exact items that fuel their passions.
More than 10 million sellers currently utilize generative AI tools to produce 300 million listings, which effectively removes operational friction and helps small businesses reach a wider audience.
New conversational agents help shoppers discover pre-loved alternatives to new products by matching items from a single uploaded photo, which strengthens circular commerce and sustainability goals.
Internal developers leverage specialized tools like Claude Code to triage technical bugs in under two hours, representing a significant increase in the speed of shipping and maintaining new product features.
Why it matters: Shifting from static authentication to continuous verification eliminates the trust tax that typically slows down high-value transactions. This automation allows small sellers to scale globally by removing the complexity of international compliance, payments, and logistics.
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MAZE STORY
The Maze: Amazon Web Services launched its Sovereign Cloud in Germany to provide a physically separate infrastructure that meets strict EU residency requirements. This €7.8 billion initiative creates a localized ecosystem for regulated industries to process information without relying on non-EU talent or leadership.
The infrastructure features over 90 services including AI and storage, ensuring that public sector entities keep metadata entirely within EU borders through independent billing and metering.
AWS operates the system through a dedicated parent company with German subsidiaries led by EU citizens to mitigate legal risks associated with foreign government access to private data.
The expansion plan introduces new sovereign local zones in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal to help businesses run latency-sensitive applications while maintaining strict control over data location.
Why it matters: This move directly addresses trust deficits created by the US CLOUD Act, allowing ecommerce firms in regulated sectors to scale across Europe while satisfying local authorities. By decoupling from global dependencies, Amazon cements its dominance in a market increasingly wary of foreign tech oversight.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: AI Max promises more conversions, but often delivers cheaper ones. By expanding query matching, it trades precision for volume.
Across 250+ campaigns, AI Max showed lower return on ad spend and higher cost per conversion than exact or phrase match, despite higher overall reach.
Average order value under AI Max lagged other match types, indicating expansion into lower-intent queries rather than true incremental demand.
Adoption remains cautious, representing well under 1% of total account spend in many datasets, signaling that advertisers are testing, not scaling.
Why it matters: Automation changes what “exact” means. In ecommerce, where margins matter, more conversions at worse quality is not progress.
DATA TREASURE
The Maze: Ecommerce traffic is not disappearing. It is moving. Across 2023 to 2025, site visits stall, users flatten, and sessions migrate into apps and marketplaces, concentrating demand into fewer, faster, habit driven surfaces.
Apps post +13% session growth YoY while site visits and unique visitors both slip -1%, signaling engagement is rising even as reach stagnates
US, UK and Japan drag global ecommerce visits down -1% YoY, but Brazil +7% and Russia +5% partially offset mature market fatigue
Marketplaces are the only subcategory growing in 2025 at ~15B monthly visits, while fashion, electronics and home lose 3% to 5% YoY
Amazon reaches 1.3B monthly web users and 652M app users, with no rival closing the gap across either surface
Marketplace visits grow +1% globally in 2025 despite declines in the US -2%, UK -4% and Germany -2%, driven by Brazil +12% and Mexico +16%
Why it matters: Ecommerce is consolidating around fewer doors. When growth slows, consumers compress choice, start shopping later, and favor platforms that bundle price, trust and delivery in one place.longs to those who optimize algorithms, not those who rely on awareness.
BRIEFING
🏬 Everything else in Ecommerce & Big Tech
🇺🇸 Google explained that it is keeping Gemini ad-free for now to prioritize user experience, focusing instead on monetizing AI through Search Overviews.
🇺🇸 Google Merchant Center is reportedly failing its 24-hour sync promise, with some retailers experiencing data lags of up to nine days that impact Shopping ad accuracy.
🇮🇳 India’s apparel retail sector is projected to reach $176 billion by 2030, driven by rising disposable incomes and the expansion of value fashion e-commerce.
🇬🇧 UK Supermarkets like M&S and Morrisons have launched dedicated "Jab-uary" food ranges specifically tailored for customers using GLP-1 weight-loss medications.
🇬🇧 ElevenLabs is reportedly seeking a new funding round that would value the voice AI specialist at $11 billion, nearly doubling its previous valuation.
🇺🇸 Boston Dynamics announced plans to deploy its electric humanoid robot, Atlas, at Hyundai's Georgia factory by 2028 to assist with parts sequencing and assembly.
MARKET PULSE
🇺🇸 Tariffs As Theater
The Maze: Respondents see US tariff threats on NATO allies as leverage, not law. MarketMaze readers overwhelmingly expect negotiation theater, not a lasting trade wall, signaling that businesses are betting on deals, not decoupling, through 2026.
75% of respondents expect US tariffs on NATO allies to be used mainly as a bargaining tool in talks, while 25% see only partial or temporary measures, implying low belief in sustained protectionism through 2026.
The backdrop matters. In early 2026, the US threatened 10% to 25% tariffs on several European allies tied to geopolitical disputes, yet leaders on both sides publicly framed them as pressure tactics, not permanent policy.
History supports the skepticism. Past US tariff threats on allies in 2018–2020 were largely softened or reversed after concessions, conditioning executives to treat tariff noise as a timing risk, not a structural reset.
Why it matters: For ecommerce and marketplaces, this mindset delays hard supply chain shifts but increases short term volatility. Brands plan for flexibility, not exit, and keep cross border trade alive while waiting for the noise to fade.
THAT’S IT FOR TODAY!
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See you next time in the maze!
MarketMaze team
